Karen Armstrong is a former Catholic nun, who rejected her former faith, and became a prominent writer on religious topics. She’s perhaps best known for A History of God, but this post is about some of her ideas in The Case for God. Although she left the Church, she didn’t become an atheist, but merely evolved from a traditional conservative stance to a more liberal and mystical relationship to God. This book was provoked by attacks on religion-in-general by the “Four Horsemen” of the New Atheism. She admits that their critique had some validity regarding the resurgence of fundamentalism, but it threw-out the practical baby with the doctrinal bathwater. For her, religion is about personal practice, not conformist Faith. She now claims that God is the essence of reality, and is multi-cultural, as known by many names, such as God, Brahman, Nirvana, or Tao. So, her deity is not the idol with clay feet demolished by the atheists. Since this is close to my own philosophical position, I’ll examine a few of her arguments, as she makes a plausible case for a more oriental and mystical concept of God.
She begins by pointing out that “it is inaccurate to call God the Supreme Being because God is not a being at all.” That assertion is compatible with my own notion that G*D is instead BEING : the power to be, the source of existence. Hence, not a humanoid person on a celestial throne, but the transcendent power behind all of reality. She is dismissive of attempts to prove the existence of God scientifically. “Catholic theology goes for the modern, scientific God.”So she makes her case for God philosophically. “Aquinas starts out by saying we can’t define God. . . . Then he immediately pulls the rug out from under our feet, saying that we have no idea what such a being is or how it can exist. We can’t even say it exists. All we’ve proved is the existence of a mystery.” Despite that open-ended uncertainty, the Catholic Church turned his arguments into orthodoxy, and their religion was grounded on acceptance of those dogmatic ideas : The Faith. By contrast, Armstrong says, “Religion is a practical form of knowledge . . . a disciplined way of life.” That’s not mindless rituals, but the development of skills for ego-control and for living in an uncertain world.
For Armstrong, the point of religion is to promote compas-sion in action : “This is the test of religiosity in every single one of the major world traditions.” Unfortunately, most of the world’s mystery religions have reveled in elaborate methods for keeping gnostic secrets from the general public, rather than practicing benevolence. I suppose Armstrong could be loosely characterized as a Mysterian1, but not a Mystic or a Gnostic. Again, she asserts that, “God is unnamable. You can never know the essence of the divine.” That sounds like a description of The Tao by Lao Tse. Later, she uses a Greek term from the Bible as an analogy for God’s enigmatic essence, “We know God's external qualities, but we can never know his ousia or inner nature.” In the original vernacular, the noun “ousia2” was derived from the verb “to be”, and could be used in the sense of “I am”. Christians made a connection with God’s self-identification from the burning bush, “I Am”, and began to use the concept of Ousia in their theology. In my own deology I prefer the less mysterious term BEING.
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To the unknown God
1. Mysterian : Mysterianism is a philo-sophical position that admits that some problems are unresolvable. Hence, they remain agnostic regarding such issues as the nature of Consciousness, and the existence of God. This may seem like a cop-out, but it is intended to be a principled worldview, admitting that empirical methods have limits. They are bound to the finite realm of space-time, and don’t apply to questions of transcendence.
2. Ousia Colloquially, it simply refers to stuff in general. Theo-logically, it’s usually trans-lated as some form of “to be” or “I am”. Philosophically, it refers to the fundamental substance or essence of reality. It is basic “existence” or “being” in a non-specific general sense : not beings, but beingness. Like my term BEING, it can be thought of as the power to be.
The Tao that can be told isnot the eternal Tao;
The name that can be named is not the eternal name.
The nameless is the beginning of heaven and earth.
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